Review: Urinetown
This eco-warning musical can hardly be billed as feel-good but the music is. Mark Hollmann’s music and lyrics are as fresh as they were in 2001, and Greg Kotis’ book and lyrics are sadly prescient. This ambitious professional standard musical is something we almost take for granted with BLT. In festival time, we lose sight of some regular theatre work But this is overall the finest Fringe theatre event I’ve seen so far.
Review: The Ferryman
Butterworth’s masterpiece The Ferryman rightly draws comparison with Sean O’Casey, for one, Conor McPherson and Brendan Behan’s The Hostage. It’s a homage taken boldly by a mainland British dramatist who stands in this play worthy of comparison with any of them.
Review: A Lie of the Mind
Sam Shepard declared that the wrong play got the Pulitzer. Buried Child was he felt crude by comparison with the later 1985 A Lie of the Mind. It joins the other meta-myths of America in the chopped sentences of demented individuals we see too much of. The extraordinary convergence of the ending seems not quaint and outdated but prescient again.
Review: The Treatment
Aisling Loftus’ Anne has chosen to have her experiences dramatized, to become a commodity of herself. She’s in flight. It’s the way Anne’s airbrushed out of her own story but also out of her life before this concludes, disappearing because the story’s more real than Anne is, that carries such a deadly sting nearly a quarter of a century later.
Review: Fracked!
A finely-balanced play, not on the issues, which Beaton takes as open-and-closed. But in shading the opposition to Anne Reid’s reluctant campaigner Beaton shows warmth, humour and touches of compassion. Anne Reid comprises dignity and resolute panache in equal measure. James Bolam, apparently a beat behind, charms and rivets attention by turns. Harry Hadden-Paton’s PR Joe is a magnificent, unrepentant performance of sheer nastiness and Michael Simkins’ hapless oilman surprisingly sympathetic. A play that sharpens our tools for thinking and falling about with blunt laughter.
Review: Don Juan in Soho
Don David Tennant’s priapic thrusts might rise above the title but of course he’s in the classic armour (aka condoms) of two guvnors, Moliere and updater Patrick Marber; it’s exhilarating. This is one play you must see, so transcendent in its theme it asks you the same questions.
Review: Travesties
Together with textual revisions making this a newly-definitive production, with the cast re-moulding it and above all Hollander’s superbly faltering diffidence, this is the outstanding revival of a play in the West End this season.
Review: The Crucible
This masterpiece of courageous refusal gets one of its finest performances in recent memory. Proctor’s decision and Slattery’s delivery of his great lines: ‘Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life!’ rings down this supreme testament to honesty – to bear false witness and incriminate others to save oneself - in the face of tyranny. Slattery defines this role in a way very few have; his energy radiates through a superbly lucid, passionately argued production.
Review: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
Daniel Radcliffe’s Rosencrantz is the box-office draw, all bemusement, beautifully drawn out in a hollow-cheeked slow horror of his lot. But it’s as Guildenstern that Joshua McGuire’s sashay from affront to despair through bemusement encompasses the open-mouth ‘lads’ Hamlet greets both with. And David Haig’s Player knowing he’s the opposite of a person insulates his reflective volatility from extinction. On the fiftieth anniversary of its Old Vic debut, Stoppard’s early masterpiece still startles in such a first-rate revival, protesting life to the black-out.
Review: The Lottery of Love
Dorothea Myer-Bennett is simply outstanding in her unravelment from uffishness as the heroine Sylvia, to a self-discovering naked passion prepared to offer anything. That’s the essence of a playwright too-little seen who’s provoked the most blissful comedic production this spring affords. Outstanding in nearly every way, it’s another gem from Richmond’s Orange Tree.
Review: Othello
If we’re impressed with overwrought maleness then finally it’s the women who impress most, who render service to a tragedy mired in the perennial soldier’s fear: betrayal.. Invigorating, and a future mine to other productions, this Othello opens a trap door.
Review: Consent
Raine balances articulate ferocity with its opposite: a broken plea. Exceptionally well-written Consent’s clean logic and logic-chopping with consequences, amplified with a pinch of myth, indeed poltergeists, might well become a small classic.
Review: Million Dollar Quartet
This is outstanding for is peerless characterising of the four legends with their unexpected female singer, the acting of Duncan and above al for the way the structure allows such extraordinary musicianship its head.
Review: Limehouse
How do you tell if you’re starting afresh or writing a longer suicide note than Labour’s 1983 manifesto? Even if he can’t nail the specifics of the volte-face, Waters comes tantalisingly close to defining such a political moment in this short drama of the founding of the SDP. With acting as superb indeed commanding as this, it’s a privilege to come away watery-eyed from raw leeks.
Review: Thoroughly Modern Millie
Plews and Wicks have created a musical powerhouse literally all-singing and dancing, of the highest West End standards. The quintet – and they blend magnetically together – of Clifton, Barrett, Rush, Glover and McDuff have stamped character and stomped bliss on this musical.
Review: Twelfth Night
Tamsin Greig’s extremes as Malvolia mark the first intimations of the terrible and define this production The only caveat with this predominantly youthful cast is that January’s chilly ivy hasn’t pricked more fingers. But the ground’s shifted.
Review: The Miser
The famous adage of farce as tragedy played at breakneck speed begs questions of how much pathos Moliere wished to inject, how fast he wanted to go in The Miser. All teeters towards the tragedy of the absurd. This may not be 1668 very exactly, but it’s the nearest to one side of Moliere we’ve seen for years, and conveys something of the shock of his new.
Review: Tamburlaine
What Yellow Earth manage so well is to forge a contemporary life for Tamburlaine. Stylised, stylish and sassy in the best sense, this touring production make Tamburlaine accessible. With caveats noted, it renders the first early modern English language play the greatest service: a horrible relevance.
Review: Invincible
What’s so distinctive in Torben Betts is his misleading us into an almost farcical comedy that turns darker. Just as stereotypes settle, plots unravel them. The climax is devastating, not explosively but in revelatory shudders. A fine unexpectedness marks both this superb play and outstandingly-acted revival.
Review: Mr Foote’s Other Leg
Slapstick comedy is difficult to bring off, even more fiendish to write. Tomlinson’s cast turn in here a performance as fine as anything I’ve seen in Lewes. Most of all, Kelly’s superb play in their hands lowers not a tap in one of Franklin’s thermometers to any professional production.
Review: The Actress
Quilter’s best known for Glorious! and End of the Rainbow. His output’s devoted to theatrical experience; his obsession’s fed into performative actors, mainly women. Quilter doesn’t allow obvious endings, or neat ones in this touchingly funny homage to theatrical living. This production does as much for The Actress as any revival anywhere.
Review: Out of Order
Out of Order is a superbly revised first-rank farce with not a weak link, furiously paced featuring perhaps the only time the window (in person?) gets a curtain call.
Review: The Deep Blue Sea
Pat Boxall paces this production with the pause and sudden rush Rattigan often asks for. Emmie Spencer’s subtle anguish as Hester carries the arc of this production superbly; with the twist of a half-smile she makes Hester vulnerable, indeed loveable, less heroine, more human. Happily her consummate Hester is answered here: in the scale of production, in Jeremy Crow’s empathic, passionate plea for life as Miller; and a host of supporting foils from cast members.
Review: The Glass Menagerie
Led by Cherry Jones and Michael Esper, Williams’ fresh map of hopeless chances freshly realized, in a revival whose pitch is as perfect as the flowers picked off Amanda’s mouldy dress.
Review: Hamlet
This Hamlet shouldn’t be remembered just for Scott’s improvisatory humanity, though that’s key to what follows. This work emerges infused with family tragedy, intimate disquiet and treachery slant.
Review: Nell Gwynn
Swale’s unique: she writes a play of feline-scratching wit that’s a feelgood hommage, where intellectual pyrotechnics never feel out of place. We’ve recently enjoyed The Libertine’s brilliantly-lit darkness revived too, and revived Nell Gwynn is the antipode to Jeffreys’ profound masterpiece. Just as clever, as fiendishly witty, Swale’s orange-girl raillery refuses the other’s command to dislike. It ends too, in a startling reality, and tenders a shock.
Review: Ugly Lies the Bone
Lindsey Ferrentino’s 2015 play Ugly Lies the Bone confronts three issues in one. PTSD and military women power many debates, as does virtual reality therapy. The play’s double thread means fruitful collisions in this open-ended approach suggest a scope that can’t be worked out in either. Despite slightly pat consolations, this drama that readily breaks out of those intentions. Fleetwood’s on stage virtually as it were the whole time, overwhelming in her shuddery defiance.
Review: Low Level Panic
Claire McIntyre’s Low Level Panic might seem a slight play at seventy-five minutes of apparently low-key plotting and vestigial images, but after thirty years it loses nothing in impact. Time’s conferred both an indictment and uneasy classic status to this masterly first sliver of a much-missed dramatist.
Review: The Duke of Milan
A fine curtain-raiser to a year of Massinger, a later Jacobean whose career took a while to fly, was always poor and eleven of whose plays ended as pie-liners. There’s fifteen solo-authored and many collaborations to discover, several in this year’s RND. Frances Marshall ensures a superbly spirited ensemble piece, with apposite small props and a freshness you can smell. Though three hours with a break this never once even falters; it’s as realized a performance as you could ever wish, touched with scenic brilliance.
Review: Rattle of a Simple Man
Sad prostitute meets superannuated virgin in 1962. A fine thoughtful and very welcome revival, with Leah Mooney and Des Potton bravely baring all their vulnerabilities at the least.
Review: The Cherry Orchard
A joyful sadness more nearly than most strikes the balance Chekhov mockingly prescribes in The Cherry Orchard: a comedy, grasping a clutch of infernos. Jade Wlliams’ grief-clenched crumpling as Varya perhaps steals the show but Simon Scardfield’s misery-infused Epikhodov, Abhin Galeya’s weedily gauche Trofimov and Sian Thomas’s giddy Ranevsky round out a memorable whirligig of a production.
Review: Ladies’ Day
Amanda Whittington’s feelgood Ladies' Day finds Seaford Little on fine turf. Wright and James particularly together are a delight, and Faulkner’s pitch-perfect Donegal Patrick not only brings the whiff of paddock and angst but allows Forshaw to glint, contrasting her well-founded characterisation. Picott paces a sterling production from a small house, with moments of brilliance.
Review: Blood Wedding
There’s no swift way to convey duende, the spirit of flamenco, passion and tragedy so unrelentingly – and there’s not a hint of comedy here, no shading to hide in. This hugely challenging drama stamps out its soul in this courageous, literally no-prisoners production.
Review: Saint Joan
Rourke directs a wonderfully lean vehicle for Shavian dialectic as furious power-play. Aterteron bestrides the board table as a scruffy colossus who brings it values to collapse all shares in any market. She has to burn. It’s something we need reminding of.
Review: ‘Art’
Tim Key, Paul Ritter and Rufus Sewell dazzle in this Old Vic revival of ‘Art’ directed by Matthew Warchus. Reza joked of her Olivier Comedy award: ‘I’m surprised, I thought I’d written a tragedy’ and this visceral but almost (dare one say, given the subject) cubist probing of the hairline crack between the two both affirms and denies Reza’s claim she’s not a cerebral writer. She asks dangerous questions of just what the ‘art’ of friendship consists of, and why.
Review: Not Dead Enough
Richie’s layered and occasionally skewed avuncularity brings a troubled warmth to Grace, a baffled tenderness. Nothing is as it seems and though McKenna has telescoped and altered the ending as such, the plot as presented falls apart in impossibilities. James is praised for exceptional plotting and vital elements – perhaps mere moments - are missing. It makes for a thrilling if improbably ending.
Review: The White Devil
The gender-slashing part of Vittoria demands venom and defiance as well as passion in verse. Joseph Timms and Kate Stanley-Brennan as Vittoria shine delivering Webster’s verse, pointing up with defiant splendor or self-delighting braggadocio tinged with Trainspotting. Ryan’s pacey revival is timely, thrusting us to Webster’s sadly timeless themes. But misogyny’s purged of its merely temporal strut with the force of such verse inhabited, which lays its living sinew bare.
Review: Gaslight
A first-rate revival of perhaps the classic stage thriller. Young and Blackledge bring fine characterful energy to their roles, as does Anderson, but the evening belongs to the range Tointon brings to her psycho-Cindarella role, and the gravelly improbable Prince Charming ‘old enough to be your grandfather’ Keith Allen. Banks’ pace never slackens: everyone’s given enough rope at the end to manage anything.
Review: Escaped Alone
Escaped Alone frames four women chatting in deckchairs in this everyday talk of tea and catastrophe - just as one of them steps into the void to prophesy a smorgasbord of Armageddons. The protean Churchill touches yet another dimension too. Do we have to wait to her eightieth in 2018 to proclaim her our greatest living playwright?
Review: The Playboy of the Western World
It was the third and last act mingling high farce and near-tragedy as it does, that pitches this part of the already superb performance to outstanding by any standard. The legendary production by Druid Theatre Galway in 2009 came to mind. This part of the night is on a par with it. There can be no higher praise.
Review: Winter Solstice
Winter Solstice, Schimmelpfennig’s apparently naturalistic fable is more than timely. As a dead-of-winter warning, it urges us to recalibrate, rewind our imaginations to the point where we might stop the tide of reasonable boundaries tightening into a noose.
Review: The Homecoming
Mid-period Pinter’s almost superseding the early ground-breaking works in popularity, and for good reason. Along with the later Old Times and No Man’s Land, The Homecoming’s recently been revived and re-appraised. Culann Smyth’s interaction with John Tolputt fascinates; and Smyth’s terrors jump out with reality. O’Shea has paced this with a tread that we follow down to the last triangle of light. A superb revival.
Review: Wish List
Erin Doherty gives a quite brilliant portrayal of someone rendered nearly voiceless who on occasion has to find a desperate authority and at other moments, aspire. Rarely have the terrible antimonies of work and benefits system been so precisely notated, and never the combined effect calibrated to crush out young lives so mapped. It’s an essential play that charts the betrayal of a generation.
Review: The Lower Depths
Gorky’s 1902 The Lower Depths is a vividly long evening, and holds the attention, but a huge challenge to pull into the shaggy shabby masterpiece it is. We emerge drier-eyed from this production, but it’s a bracing winter play, and all too grimly calls us out to act. It’s a seminal drama too, rarely seen, making this an essential pilgramage.
Review: Mary Stuart
Supremely realized by Stevenson and Williams, Icke’s triumphant production dispenses with trappings save to point up the reverse symbolism at the end which like all opposites fuses into one lost head in two, as both queens’ final gaze burns like scenes from an execution.
Review: Hedda Gabler
Occasionally opaque, van Hove frames his eloquent prison with enough space for Greek tragedy and his uniformly fine cast to project it, however skew. Wilson’s supreme power, refracted through the cataract of this fitfully illuminating production, is to convey the sense that whatever role she might have chosen, Hedda’s grown up dead.
Review: Sunny Afternoon
What makes this outstanding is Penhall’s wit and deft charactering of core band and satellites who interact with the complexity of a play, the way the songs move the narrative forward and are given believable geneses. This outstanding musical deserves the awards its original incarnation garnered – and it brings back The Kinks forever sharing the peak of British pop with The Who, The Stones and pre-eminently The Beatles.
Review: The Wizard of Oz
It beggars belief that on one tiny stage we can be subjected to so many scene stages so expertly handled, so many backdrops and scenery shifts, not to mention a cast of twenty-two who can all sing. This production is good enough for a larger professional stage. If you get a chance, ask for a ticket or return.
Review: Cymbeline
A Cymbeline that redefines the title role. This is perhaps the best mostly-uncut Cymbeline we can hope for till our nerves settle, but then again Cymbeline’s a state-of-the-nation vehicle, and has come again into its own.
Review: The Tempest
Walter’s is a reading riven with pained clarity – a conflicted anguish visibly traced on her face – sealing the broken majesty of this performance. It’s the pinnacle of the rough magic of a production fresh, streetwise with animated verse deliveries, vocal range and above all the new-minted, brave new world.
Review: The White Devil
The towering gender-slashing part of Vittoria demands venom and defiance as well as passion in verse. Peak delivers these with the kind of nuance in extremis that makes one wonder what more she could do with the part. As her brother Flamineo, the flame-voiced Bennett has great potential as a verse speaker, based on the rationale and clarity he brings here. The great lines at the end comprise the finest number of exits in drama.
Review: One Night in Miami…
This work’s even more urgent now human rights in the US and elsewhere are temporarily at the least regrouping. Kwei-Armah’s pace and dance made this beautiful to hear and behold, but even more to absorb. An all-black cast has been a long time coming.
Review: The Children
This devil’s bargain of a drama is how one generation takes responsibility for the ecological box of spiders it’s let out. One strength lies in avoiding the obvious. For one thing the children are absent. Kirkwood’s masterly play resonates with macrocosmic power, towering over the minutiae of living.
Review: The Tempest
It’s clear something miraculous and patient is born from this simple but endlessly detailed production, releasing The Tempest into its fullest consciousness for a long time. However many Tempests you might have attended, see this one.
Review: Blood Brothers
The show - nearly three hours - never for a moment seemed it, gripping the audience so tightly the whole audience rose spontaneously to its feet – something I’ve not seen in this theatre. The blend of definitive and new cast members in a recent classic has overwhelming impact.
Review: The Comedy About a Bank Robbery
The Comedy About a Bank Robbery redefines the category, by edging beyond even recent work and revealing a classic structure entering a hall of mirrors and going mad. The musical as well as general ensemble is the most remarkably timed I’ve ever seen in a theatre, and the set designs and shifts the most frantically split into milliseconds. This is an outstanding and redefining farce in every way.
Review: The Libertine
Dominic Cooper’s Rochester is up for it, as he tells the audience. Jeffreys has assured us of the finest, shrewdest, darkly poetic play of these times the centuries between have ever known.
Review: The Nest
This translation is more than a vivid spin on a foreign play. McPherson has spotted kindred and made it a blood brother of his imagination.
Review: The Shakespeare Revue
A consummate delight in this now rarest of forms; a tight song-and-dance of words. New material sizzles, inserted towards the end, the whole box of Bards from Bernard Levin’s Quoting Shakespeare to McKee’s arrangement of Shakespeare lines for a musical lights-out dances on the edge of hilarity before falling headlong into it.
Review: Lady Chatterley’s Lover
In adaptor Phillip Breen’s hands there’s not just one set of lovers here, however partly incapacitated: indeed there’s deep feeling released in this couple’s performance. The decision taken to highlight this is treasurable. One wonders if Clifford – tortured, typing, refusing to be typecast as war-emasculated cripple and even hoping to revive - is the hero. Breen makes a fine case for it.
Review: The Chronicle History of Perkin Warbeck
This Wannamaker Read Not Dead performance of The Chronicle History of Perkin Warbeck seals the proof that T. S. Eliot was right: it’s the finest non-Shakespearean history play of the whole Elizabethan-to-Caroline canon.
Review: The Coxcomb
Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Coxcomb is one of their finest, a sparkling yoke of two love-plots involving feminism and sexual freedom unparalleled in the period’s comedy.
Review: The Clean House
Sarah Ruhl’s The Clean House is paced by director Sam Chittenden with clean elegance, counterpointing the messiness of existence with the neatness of fable, and the human need to straddle, even celebrate both. In a play about the perfect one-liner, we get the joke and far from killing us it offers us a small lesson in loving.
Review: The Boys in the Band
Mark Gatiss might be the best-known of the ensemble in The Boys in the Band but delights in being just one of this nine-hander which never falters, never droops and dances words to actions in a small masterpiece that seems poised to remain contemporary forever.
Review: Amadeus
In the most spectacular production imaginable, the antagonisms between the black-suited and marzipan fight it out in this extraordinary sumptuous and consummately musical production. Far from seeming out of place, Adam Gillen’s Young Ones-style shrilling brat with his technicolour frock-coats seems almost more attuned than Salieri to his milieu. It’s naturally the corresponding gravity this production looks to though: Lucian Msmati’s supremely crafted lead sets off the quicksilver of his rival to an unprecedented extent.
Review: Oil
This is a fabulous tale. Duff’s portrayal, tightrope-walking tenderness over an abyss of fear and atavistic decisions, forms the long burning-down wick of the play. Necessary theatre, and Hickson’s decision to focus on the mother-daughter axis underscores a neat parable of what we say we love, and how it might really love us back.
Review: A Tale of Two Cities
An outstanding production, with the central character given an outstanding performance by Joseph Timms. He’s supported by a near-faultless cast, and no weak links with a whiplash direction against the best of backdrops, even for the worst of times.
Review: The Entertainer
Gawn Granger carries the memory of greatness and it’s this elusive elixir Archie, consummately but seedily played by Branagh, which stands in for those lost ideals Osborne’s first great character Jimmy Porter grasped at. It’s the toppling of Archie Rice’s own inner idol, or failure to do so, that sends this absorbing production out whistling into the dark.
Review: Breakfast at Tiffany’s
Character-acting keeps this near-impossible-to-dramatize story a play. Since the film’s different, this charmingly-attempted soufflé of an adaptation might do the best service of all: send people in search of a ninety-page novella, and that’s in large print.
Review: Love’s Labour’s Lost/Much Ado About Nothing
This Love’s Labour's Lost is one of the great show-changing interpretations in Shakespeare and confirms this production as the most outstanding of this play for years. It has heart, plangency and not a little devastation. This production of Much Ado About Nothing finally grounds the play in a post-war setting it has long begged. Both the plays’ malefaction and mischievous confusion, and hectic high spirits, are given the most truthful reading of recent years. We feel we’ve permanently understood some characters in a way never before revealed.
Review: The Merchant of Venice
This outstandingly layered production seethes with Antonio’s and Shylock’s polar hatred. At the end of Judgement they’re both broken. Jonathan Pryce’s Shylock details as much hatred as Antonio (Dominic Mafham exhaling melancholy) and Venetian anti-Semites direct in spittle.
Review: No’s Knife
We’re enormously privileged to be living in such a rich age of Beckett performance, and here, a soaring creative response Beckett encouraged has claimed these texts as dramatic. Somehow Dwon avoids dissolution with her tensile strength and staggered, staggering vocal range, brushed with a tang of mortality.
Review: Imogen: Cymbeline Renamed and Reclaimed
This production sucked in a whole audience and breathed it out with laughter. Its power’s a popular, indeed populist one. And in Maddy Hill’s furious dove we’ve identified an Imogen many can reclaim, or claim for the first time.
Review: A Room With a View
This is about as good as you could reasonably hope for. The latter half is a delight, and should send people back to the theatre for different fare, and to the book.
Review: Torn
Adelle Leonce anchors protagonist Angel’s volatile unpredictability in a superb register of loss, calibrating her response to various family members at zig-zag stages of her life. Martello-White’s clever touching-in of few specifics allows this ninety-minute piece to amplify a wincing universality.
Review: How the Other Half Loves
Ayckbourn’s genius shows how literally times are changing in this early masterpiece portraying a sexual liberation more pervasive than the noisier one raging all around 1969: it shows how far the revolutions has as it were penetrated. Strachan’s brilliance is so complete, so identified with this particular play, you forget how superbly founded it is.
Review: Love Story
Refreshing treatment of this enormously affecting musical lies in its British bite working so well with Jenny’s feisty character, and youth generally. BLT and the Craig/Nock team have scored another bull’s-eye which by the end is pretty watery.
Review: They Drink it in the Congo
Brace’s hugely ambitious piece is whipped along with rapid dissolves and shifts by Longhurst so its stranded complexity never becomes turgid or bewildering. Central character Stef is played with brightness turned up exactly right by Fiona Button.
Review: Doctor Faustus
The RSC delights in dopplegangers: alternating the main roles of Faustus and Mephistopheles with Sandy Grierson and Oliver Ryan. Grierson’s commanding Mephistopheles does more than ringingly square off against Ryan’s smoky-voiced humanity. Aberg has though allowed the drama space to believe in itself, a darkness to believe in.
Review: The Alchemist
Ken Nwosu’s the stand-out, and if the RSC keep up with their Jonson, productions like these go 95% of the way to creating a relish for him.
Review: Glasgow Girls
Even on fictive terms this would garner praise for its raw power, its beating passion for justice and humanity. Difficult as it might be not to come away warmed this ensemble – and original musical – make it so very easy. This needs to be everywhere and should be shown if not live, then screened.
Review: The Dresser
The best revival we’re likely to see in a very long time, with outstanding performances from Stott and Shearsmith, with performances as strong in their way from Cadell and Thorpe, and not a weak link. It’s a masterly play from the inside, and this consummate portrayal of near-disaster ending in a successful one, is as good as it gets.
Review: Burning Bridges
Asperger-conditioned Sarah’s reels off her interests: ‘TV, One Direction, Bears, Ghandi, Oral Sex not necessarily in that order.’ This remarkable, necessary play explores the crisis provoked by Sarah’s single atypical act, and how it shows she’s improving - leaving domestic devastation. Shindler beautifully judges the pathos and development in each of her three main protagonists.
Review: A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur
A first-rate revival, the best we’re likely to see though hopefully not the last of late Williams. Oakley’s hinted there’s more to revive. Meanwhile, don’t miss this legacy-changing production.
Review: Strife
An outstanding and revelatory production of an outstanding play, whose relevance moves beyond even the tortured steel industry of today’s Wales or Britain to other professions undergoing exploitation, conflict of interest and barbaric intervention.
Review: Relatively Speaking
Not a creak in this sparkling production: Liza Goddard possesses an innate sense of how this should go: straight, elegant sang-froid touched with just the right amount of welcome; Powell inhabits the higher bluster; Antony Eden pitches it just right; Lindsey Campbell exudes recently thrown-off gawkiness. Herford knows what he’s about: pace, panache, and more than a dose of Ayckbourn’s generosity of spirit, which glows here as telling the world how it was going to be.
Review: The Truth
This is as good a machine for portraying infidelity as we’re likely to see. Hanson delivers frantic timing and hard-paced farce, O’Connor provides an elegant foil mixing guilt with anxiety, desire and cool pragmatism; Franks’ Laurence is always ready to spring shut on the luckless protagonist. Her counterpart in Portal conveys a flicker of reined-in menace, bluff urbanity waiting to pounce. Zeller quotes Voltaire’s scepticism about truth-telling: permanently unfashionable, perennially worth reviving
Review: Faith Healer
A supremely orchestrated production, the best we’re likely to see of Friel’s masterpiece for the play’s time-span, about twenty years. As Frank’s faith-healer character must have experienced, this production rapidly sold out, not through high-tech advertising blitzes, but word of mouth.
Review: Yerma
Piper’s excelled before but nothing has prepared for this devastating performance in Stone’s almost completely re-written play: a break-out wildness, a grieving as incandescent as anything in Greek Tragedy, connecting with Lorca beyond Stone.
Review: Present Laughter
Expertly-tailored, classy and for the most part surely-pitched fare: Stephen Unwin is sure-footed too and coaxes the best from his ensemble: jewel-like precision, light-footed blocking and quotable gestures makes this a production ravishingly conscious of its superiority.
Review: The Seagull
Olivia Vinall provides a tremulous foil for Joshua James’ vulnerable volatile Konstanin in a fresh emphasis on youth superbly undermined by Anna Chancellor and Geoffrey Streatfeild. World-class English-speaking Chekhov.
Review: Ivanov
Geoffrey Streatfeild inhabits this most problematic Chekhovian role like a stooping question-mark, a lanky laureate of the Russian superfluous man. James McArdle’s angular self-deluding hatred and smoothed-down hair and cheeks compresses into a Caledonian hiss worthy of John Knox. Nina Sosanya’s ardent but dignified pleading and Oivia Vinall’s headlong ardour all combine an explosive mix. Outstanding.
Review: Platonov
James McArdle’s vibrant, sexy quixotically self-aware Platonov is just the star of this family of actors assembled for the three Chekhov plays at the National, with perfectly judged reactions from each other like a small repertory company. In David Hare’s vivid yet faithful version - compressed by half - it’s no small feat to have finally delivered a definitive sixth masterpiece of Chekhov’s.
Review: The Plough and the Stars
The plot’s shocking volte-faces, so perfectly realized here streaked with blood and comedy, make this O’Casey’s masterpiece. Stephen Kennedy’s dipsily detailed drunk is the great turn here in a cast where Judith Roddy, Justine Mitchell, Josie Walker, and Grainne Keenan also excel in this flawless production.
Review: Pigs and Dogs
In a quarter-hour we’re struck with a rich and head-spinning narrative of how same-sex culture’s been oppressed first by the west and now through European language. You end up stopping in outraged disbelief at this virulent legacy of colonialism. If you can’t see it, read it.
Review: Unreachable
A profoundly quizzical play about directorial and film-mogul silliness, using one liners and silliness to address these questions.
Review: No Villain
Superb premiere of Miller’s 1936 play showing more than glimpse of the later Miller and more autobiographically-based than any other work would be again.
Review: Sunset at the Villa Thalia
Making noise quietly, Campbell’s new play perhaps pulls a few punches because it believes in quiet. Ben Miles dominates the stage in this uneasy parable, and Elizabeth McGovern’s uproariously funny and pathos-ridden.
Review: Rehearsal for Murder
Clever piece by the Murder She Wrote team, set in 1989, mostly ingenious, mostly satisfying Whoddunit.
Review: The Importance of Being Ernest
Beautifully designed and sumptuous production where the palm goes to the older cast, in this fresh and vigorous production. Look out for matching buttonholes, silks and ensemble.
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